‘By the Numbers’ – how TV learned to sell Weird

I have a good friend who used to tell me that I was wrong about Lost (2004-’10).  He used to encourage me to watch it, insisting that you had to give yourself time to become immersed in the characters and setting to understand the show’s genius.  He stopped trying around the start of the fifth season, shortly after which I found him collapsed on my doorstep, a broken shell of a man, managing to mumble between sobs about time-travelling donkey wheels, and exploding hydrogen bombs.  It seemed the show’s enigmatic façade of unanswerable riddles and allegorical innuendo was finally peeling back to reveal what I had always suspected was at its core – absolutely nothing.  I was one of those skeptical spoilsports who dismissed the show after only a couple of episodes’-worth of teleporting polar bears, mystery numbers, and central characters facilely named after famous philosophers, and so took smug pleasure in reports that its tantalising surrealism, which had kept my friend and so many others watching for so long, was  dissolving before their eyes into a series of unbelievably crude, literalistic reveals.